Dear Quote Investigator: The following popular adage balances unsteadily between brilliance and absurdity:

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.

This notion has been attributed to many people including famous baseball player Yogi Berra, scientific genius Albert Einstein, and prominent physicist Richard P. Feynman. What do you think?

Quote Investigator: There is no substantive reason to credit Berra, Einstein, or Feynman. The expression was coined before Einstein had reached his third birthday and before the other two were born.

The earliest strong match located by QI appeared in “The Yale Literary Magazine” of February 1882 which was written and edited by students. Benjamin Brewster who was a member of the class of 1882 wrote about an argument he had engaged in with a philosophical friend about theory versus practice. His companion accused him of committing a vulgar error. Emphasis added to excerpts by QI: 1

I heard no more, for I was lost in self-reproach that I had been the victim of “vulgar error.” But afterwards, a kind of haunting doubt came over me. What does his lucid explanation amount to but this, that in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, while in practice there is?

Brewster was humorously summarizing the position of his friendly opponent, and QI believes that the saying should be credited to Brewster.

Dear Quote Investigator: The participants in several fields of endeavor have selected names that include the word “science”, e.g., Political Science, Information Science, Military Science, Library Science, Domestic Science, and Computer Science. This motley collection inspired the following quip:

Anything with “science” in its name is not a science.

Would you please explore the origin of this saying?

Quote Investigator: Because this jest can be expressed in many ways it is difficult to trace. The data below is not presented as definitive; it is being shared so that others may have a starting point to build upon.

In 1975 Gerald M. Weinberg published “An Introduction to General Systems Thinking”, and the first chapter ended with a set of exercises. The seventh exercise presented a jocular law which Weinberg attributed to Frank Harary who was a prominent mathematician in the field of graph theory. Boldface has been added to excerpts: 1

The misnaming of fields of study is so common as to lead to what might be general systems laws. For example, Frank Harary once suggested the law that any field that had the word “science” in its name was guaranteed thereby not to be a science. He would cite as examples Military Science, Library Science, Political Science, Homemaking Science, Social Science, and Computer Science.

This citation was the earliest known to QI though the joke referred to some domains of thought which were named many decades before the 1970s. QI suspects that this citation can be antedated.

1975, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking by Gerald M. Weinberg, Chapter 1: The Problem, (Questions for Further Research: Exercise 7), Quote Page 24 and 25, Published by John Wiley & Sons, New York. (Verified on paper) ↩